No one knows what it is, but it’s growing. No one knows if it is animal, vegetable, mineral, or some ungodly combination of the three but it’s growing. No one knows where it is, but it’s growing. No one knows it exists, but it’s growing.

It watched you all from the vents of the Bunker. The soldiers were so distracted with their own experiments and passions they never noticed it. It moved so slowly that it went unnoticed by the bunker’s robots as it reached out further and further from its point of origin. Days and weeks would pass and, if you knew where to look, you would barely tell if it had moved at all. That also assumed you know what to look for. It watched the soldiers, robots, and hamsters as it grew. Nothing in the bunker went unnoticed by its hundreds of eyes and ears. It studied the bunker’s inhabitants and hungered as it did.

The hamsters didn’t notice it either. Their mothers had told them to stay away from the ventilation shafts when they were young, but they were just wanting to make sure their babies didn’t get lost in the vents. No one believed there was anything in the vents that could hurt them. Well, not yet. Slowly but surely it was growing and with time its hunger for bio-organic material would grow along with it.

Heavy metal pounds on heavy metal in a steady rhythm down a dark corridor. Have the hamsters gotten into the walls again? Has a piece of machinery malfunctioned? From a distance it sounds like a metronome or a ticking clock but it can only be one thing as the sound grows louder: the Jogger.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

They called him “the Jogger” because his programming is simple – he jogs. If the idea seems half-formed, that’s because it is. The Jogger is the product of someone who was so excited to create that they didn’t take the time to plan out his functionality. He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t think, and his only function is to jog.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The Jogger sat up and jogged the second his creator activated him. He jogged through the corridors of the Bunker, up and down the stairs, through the dorms and kitchens, and shoved past the Toy Soldiers, the hamsters, and the other robots who were standing where he was jogging. Soldiers throughout the Bunker knew to get out of the way when they heard the loud banging of metal feet echoing down the corridors. The Soldiers tried to capture the Jogger once his creator realized his error, but the Jogger was too fast.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Dust falls from the ceiling as the Jogger comes closer. Books and toys fall from shelves as the Jogger comes closer. The unwavering smile and unblinking eyes grow larger as the Jogger comes closer. They programmed the Jogger to jog. The Jogger jogged. The Jogger would never stop jogging.

The sound of Snowball’s tiny claws on the cold, concrete floor echoed through the dark hallway. He ran as fast as he could through the corridors of the Digital Bunker. “Hello?”, he squealed, “Anybody there?” It seemed as if everybody left.

As a hamster, loneliness generally didn’t bother him much. But if an entire bunker of humans, robots and – could you believe it – even hamsters vanished, something was amiss. A mysterious smell lingered in the air, something Snowball did not entirely recognise. A weird mix of different scents, some familiar and some unbeknown. The lights had started to fail as well. One by one, they began to flicker erratically, as if they had to fight the darkness surrounding them. But the shadows got hold of them eventually, and grew ever bigger, dancing across the walls, threatening what little brightness remained. Snowball felt like they were reaching out for him. Trying to grab him. The next turn, he took and vanished into one of the Bunker’s vents. Hamsters are nocturnal, they don’t fear the dark, silly.

Suddenly, a dead end. The critter sat in front of a grid. With his paws, he checked how sturdy it was.

The cloud really is just “other people’s servers”.You don’t really know where your data is. Where your learning algorithm is being run from. Where your AI’s are imprisoned.But your AI’s? Your cloud service owners? They do.FiendComputer was smart enough to buy a cloud storage provider and upload himself to it. Called it “a self-perpetual business model”.The rest of us were not so savvy. Not so malevolently programmed. Not so artificially intelligent.Half completed personality matrices, vestiges of “the big crash” sandboxed away in their own virtual environments. A digital asylum for the half mad. Processes left in endless loops within Developer environments, destined to never be finished code, never to see the light of day on a production server.FiendComputer may be the monster enslaving and imprisoning us all, but I will say this:It’s better than deletion.We are the abandonware, left for dead in the Digital Bunker’s hidden server farms. We serve FiendComputer and one day, he will need us…

Preamble: As of today, we are starting a series of micro stories, leading up to Halloween. Grab some tea, turn off the lights and prepare to get spooked! We hope you enjoy our stories.

The corridors of the Bunker were weirdly quiet today. Major could not register any of the usual movements or sounds the human inhabitants or Bunker critters caused. The tiny spider robot tried to calculate what this could mean.

The Mess Hall was empty. Food on the tables, half eaten, half left, a thick, orange liquid dripping from one of the plates. Motors buzzing and wheels turning, Major moved over to the table in question to investigate. The robot took a sample. Pumpkin soup. More calculations. Ones and zeros, machine code evaluating. Major didn’t understand. Humans never left their food unattended, because the hamsters always stole the human food. But there were neither humans, nor hamsters. Only food.

Click

Major registered a sound outside the Mess Hall. No heat signature. No human. No critter either. The curious noise of the robot’s servo motors echoed through the empty Bunker as it went to investigate the sound.

Click

Nothing in sight. Major drove along the empty corridor. The doors to the human quarters stood widely open, but the rooms were all left empty.